9. Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader (The Empire Strikes Back, 1980)

Every 12-year-old boy has, at one point, grabbed a couple of cardboard tubes and hummed along while recreating a lightsaber fight with friends. It’s practically a rite of passage, and no list of great movie fights is complete without a lightsaber duel for the pop-culture significance alone. George Lucas staged many, but none was finer than the climax of The Empire Strikes Back. Kids had been waiting three long years to see Luke and Vader face off when Empire came out, and Lucas delivered the goods. The stiff Obi-Wan-Vader duel from the original was replaced with an incredible choreographed fight that the Star Wars series has struggled to match ever since. That the epic duel concludes with one of the most shocking twists in movie history is just icing on the cake.